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Sonia Ossorio is the president of NOW-NYC, a position she has held since elected in 2004.
I know a woman from South America who spent her first night in the Big Apple in a brothel overlooking Roosevelt Avenue in Queens. With a timer at her side she â€œservicedâ€? 19 men â€“ a veritable United Nations parade of taxi drivers to restaurant workers who literally queued up for a turn to have 15 minute sex sessions with the women at this brothel.
If you never had a picture of what the low-budget, factory-style prostitution that makes up much of the local NYC sex industry, this is it â€“ up close, uncomfortable and a mockery of sex and all it stands for â€“ pleasure, sharing, sexual empowerment and womenâ€™s liberation.
At the beginning of each shift, the women are given a produce box top with two rolls of paper towels, a bottle of lube, alcohol and a baggie filled with unwrapped condoms. The condoms are prepped much like vegetables at restaurants before the rush hits. There are tips that go to the men who stand on the corners as dusk sets in and pass out business cards for the brothels and give directions to the houses where sex can be bought $30 for 15 minutes. The price went up this year from $25.

It would be a year before â€œCarmenâ€? could get out from the grasp of the trafficker who she â€œworkedâ€? for. She endured long nights of anonymous men in the beginning, a method that is used the world over by pimps and traffickers (one and the same) to break down a womanâ€™s spirit, resolve and fight. Serial rape will do that to you.
After that, the threat of violence kept her in place coupled with a threatened smear campaign of her reputation back home. Her traffickers told her if she didnâ€™t stick it out, theyâ€™d drop the news in her town that sheâ€™d become a whore in the US. She should just suck it up, make some cash and get home soon. For a Latin woman from a small town in South America womanhood is defined largely by being in the respectable camp or the whore house.
This year, NOW-NYC and the New York State Anti-Trafficking Coalition had a big role in shaping and getting an anti-trafficking law passed. It was way overdue. The DAs spend loads of money investigating scams and shakedown operations but not human trafficking. The cops hardly know what trafficking is. We have a campaign called â€œAsk A Copâ€? in which people ask cops on the street about the new law so that we can make a report and convince the NYPD that training is seriously needed. I asked two cops on the subway platform recently and they told me trafficking is only a problem in New Jersey, it was happening in NYC?!
Cops with trained eyes may have made a difference for the many women who were part of a Mexican trafficking crime ring that operated for 13 long years between Tenancingo, Mexico and Queens. Young, poor, uneducated Mexican women brought to New York were systematically raped, imprisoned and forced to work in brothels throughout the region seven days a week, servicing 25 men a day. Pregnancy ended in forced abortions. Lives, hearts and minds destroyed for profit. In 2006, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York secured 50-year prison sentences for two traffickers in this case.
You donâ€™t have to be a federal prosecutor to realize trafficking is happening throughout NYC and other cities across the country. A stroll through the yellow pages will find you knee-deep in prostitution ads, some showing children. Thereâ€™s one ad in the Manhattan book with the picture of a girl that canâ€™t be more than 10 years old. Guess what the â€œescort serviceâ€? is calledâ€”Asian Flowers. At NOW-NYC we started a campaign called â€œTrafficking Free NYC!â€? asking publishers to use common sense, do some basic due diligence and stop taking ads that exploit women through commercial sex work.
NOW-NYC will continue working on this issue. If youâ€™d like to get involved or learn more, check out our website www.nownyc.org and join our Trafficking Action Network.

Jeremy Bearer-Friend is a Visiting Fellow at Justice Now and a Leadership Academy Fellow with Young People for the American Way. An educator at heart, Jeremy has taught within public schools, private schools, home schools, after-school programs, museums, colleges and prisons.
Prisons are bad for everyone–not just for the people in cages within them, not just for the children who have lost their parents to them, or the social programs who have their budgets cut because of them.
Prisons distract us from the root causes of violence and ultimately exacerbate the deeply entrenched challenges of racism, sexism and transphobia facing our communities.
Over this past week, Justice Now posted on how prisons operate as a form of population ...

Jeremy Bearer-Friend is a Visiting Fellow at Justice Now and a Leadership Academy Fellow with Young People for the American Way. An educator at heart, Jeremy has taught within public schools, private schools, home schools, ...

Allison Forth, former client coordinator for Justice Now, just finished her Masters in Social Work at Hunter College of Social Work. Allison hopes to help create accountable and sustainable community interventions and programs that are not a part of the criminal legal system.
California is taking a fast turn down the wrong path by building â€œgender-responsiveâ€? prisons. Instead of getting caught up in the urgency of the prison crisis by attempting to create â€œbetterâ€? punishment, we should say no to â€œFemale Rehabilitative Community Correctional Centersâ€? on the state and county levels.
Some critical questions we need to ask ourselves include: is it ethical or even possible to create comprehensive and effective treatment in a prison setting? ...

Robin Levi, Human Rights Director at Justice Now , is a bi-racial Jewish woman and attorney who has been working to protect and promote the human rights of women worldwide, especially women of color in the United States. She tries, and usually fails, to balance this paid work with taking care of her two daughters (with some help from her husband) and doing unpaid work in her many communities.
At Justice Now we examine the way the California prison system destroys peopleâ€™s reproductive capacity. First, long sentences can keep people in prison through their reproductive years. And second, abysmal health care has led a significant number of people to face infertility. For example, ...

Robin Levi, Human Rights Director at Justice Now , is a bi-racial Jewish woman and attorney who has been working to protect and promote the human rights of women worldwide, especially women of color in the ...